Please Log in to Vote.

13 out of 16 members found this useful.

The Mother of all Practices

Posted June 29th, 2010 by Kevin Snorf

 My Integral Life Practice starts my day with 30 minutes of zazen, cardio or F.I.T., journaling, pranayama, then some visualization and gratitude as I shower and prepare a healthy breakfast. When I have the time I do some reading on something that is important to me. And then, as a practice, I always do the biggest/ hardest thing on my to do list for the day first (see www.eatthatfrogmovie.com). I also teach and do between 8 and 15 classes a week in yoga and jujitsu which are my two main practices I have done the longest. When I am coaching my clients, I engage in specific interpersonal practice to best serve my clients. When I interact with my girlfriend, I pull on David Deida’s work a lot as practice. At night, I even make a practice of not practicing. It is important to let myself take a break. Given that I live a pretty full, intense life too I also practice doing softer things that help me mellow out, relax, and restore so I am not over-structuring myself. So I even make a practice of  not practicing. To summarize, I have learned to live a life of practice. Sometimes I feel like all this structure of practice is cumbersome or oppressive. But the real test is to take a break from all those practices and see what happens. It is usually not so good. 

I wanted to write a blog on spiritual practice from an Integral Coaching perspective, but most of the Integral community has a good grasp on spirituality and even ILP (Integral Life Practice). So instead, I wanted to write about what I consider to be the Mother of all Practices. The one practice that is not only the hardest, but if you do it consistently it will bring you the greatest possible benefit.

Recently with knee surgery, several sicknesses, some mild depression and some other major stress factors showing up in my life, I have more often than not fallen out of my practices. It is funny how we use that term. “Out of Practice.” People ask us if we play piano? “Yeah, but I am out of practice.” As if we are not good unless we are in practice. My best friends know when I am struggling and call them for support to first ask, “How are your practices going?” I usually respond with, well I have not been writing or breathing or eating well or (insert your poison). 
 
 Everything we do in our lives, intentional or not, is practice. Our default mode IS a practice. Let us pretend you and I drop our ILP for 6 months. We are going to drop into our particular flavor of habit patterns that has made up our behaviors, beliefs, structure, and relationships until now. In coaching we call this your current way of being (CWOB). Without practices added to that mix, you will just stay as your CWOB. It usually is not so delightful. Our CWOB is a very specific form of masterful practice (and in Integral Coaching we actually name it for you). It is the practice have lived up until now. Our lives on default are habits (practices) we’ve done forever. Habits keep you in a particular shape. We even say, “I am really bent out of shape.” Or recently my buddy started working out a lot and I said, “You look in shape man!” The whole reason to practice ILP, zen,  yoga, piano scales, free-throws, knitting, etc. is that you have to choose the most optimum shape for giving your gifts and enjoying your life and then build effective new habits. So stop and ask yourself right now, what do you want your shape to be if you could move beyond habits? In Integral Coaching we would call this your New Way of Being. 
 
Choosing practices for yourself can be risky because it is hard to see yourself objectively as other people see you and know where development is really needed. This is why I fell in love with Integral Coaching. It is so useful to have an Integral Coach who has embodied the AQAL method to reflect back to you where you are hiding from yourself and help you get very targeted about navigating your developmental and spiritual path.  Even without that support though, we all have a sense of things we could do or need to do to keep our shape; and how easy it is to let those fall by the wayside. 
 
When I was going through the Integral Coach training program at Integral Coaching Canada, Joanne Hunt (co-founder) said to me, “The mother of all practice is returning to your practice.” This was an epiphany of monumental proportion. And one I am working to embody today as I see I have fallen out of practice so significantly. The first practice I actually ever was taught was when I first visited my local zendo. The man in robes told me sit on the cushion, stare at the wall, and count my breaths 1 to 10 and repeat. Every time I was to lose focus on breath, gently return my attention back to the breath and start counting back to 1. At first, I was always starting back to “1”. So I asked the guy when I would get to 100 breaths of focus. But he told me that was not the goal. The goal was to return to the practice when we lose it! And here was Joanne saying the same thing to me 12 years later. But it meant something very different now. The benefit of practice is nothing without the ability to return to practice again and again. 
 
In Integral Coaching when we give people practices we actually call it “muscle building”. Although this can be literal, it is meant more metaphorically; what muscle does the practice build inside you that might be useful to have down the road. If we don’t build certain muscles they atrophy. So when I give someone a practice about disappointing others, it is often building the muscle of being able to do what I need to do for myself even if I create discord. Often, but not always, if a practice is good for you, you are going to resist building that muscle – otherwise you might have built it already.  Part of that is we resist change, but also that those AQAL areas we do not focus on in our lives cry for attention and are often atrophied. 
 
The cool thing about what Joanne Hunt is pointing to is that there’s a muscle in all of us we can build called remembering to muscle build; always coming back to the practices that you keep your full AQAL shape. Think about how powerful that is. That muscle is what builds all other muscles. That muscle is what builds a life of practice. That muscle is what keeps the masters “enlightened”. That muscle is what keeps you focused to remember to tone your  body/ mind/ spirit for full capacity so you can offer your gifts. Without that muscle, no other muscle can get built because you will not ever even come back to your practices a second time. 
 
It’s much more self-compassionate to realize that we are human beings who are going to make mistakes and forget to do what we most need. We won’t ever keep to our practices perfectly. So every time we’re bent out of “shape” it’s actually a reminder to return to practice. To return to a new way of being. To return to that which we are most devoted to and which matches our deepest intention for living and dying. To return to muscle building in general. The next time things are off in your life, it’s worth asking yourself, “Am I out of practice?” The pain of living less than what you were born to be and offer, is the calling towards the mother of all practices; returning to those practices which most serve your unique offering of openness to the world. This is what we are called to. I know I have the option of going into habit and default mode and engaging the American practice of TV, internet surfing, gaming, alcohol, fast food, sugar, and no exercise. But I see where that practice leads. And I see where my life of practice leads. And honestly nothing feels better, than to pick myself up out of a hell realm and go sit on the cushion at the zen center. Nothing feels better than returning to my Natural State as Dzogchen would call it. How ironic it requires so much practice to stay there. 
 
Some reflection questions for you to consider in your ILP? 
  1. What assumptions do I have about practices that might facilitate me not engaging my practices or skipping over them?
  2. What triggers throw me out of practice? What kind of symptoms do I need to be aware of which will remind me to return to practice?  
  3. What practices do I know most serve my optimum “shape” and why? How might an Integral Coach help me identify those spaces I overlook or can’t solve on my own? 
 
 
 
Kevin Snorf is a Certified Integral Coach® who specializes in using the body as the gateway to deep transformative practice.

Please Log in to Vote.

1 out of 1 members found this useful.

sharpening a pencil

Posted June 30th, 2010 by stefano

A growth group I used to go to spoke about this practice:

 

Every evening at 10pm exactly, sharpen a pencil. Do it every day at exactly 10pm like your life depended on it.

Actually, it does.

 

The most infuriating thing I quickly discovered was that it was nigh impossible to make myself do this simple task, every evening, not at 10.30pm, not at 10.01pm, not skipping a day, but just doing it and staying conscious of doing it every day for the agreed 2 weeks. 

The teacher said, "Don't even think about doing what the yogis do -- you don't have the muscle! You need to develop that first before you can!"

 

Well, some people are very fit and some are very lazy and some are very talented and some have the right genes, and some are good looking and some are fat and there's a whole spectrum of abilities out there. But I have to say, that one little exercise has given me some appreciation and respect for people whom I see returning -- always returning -- to a practice.

 

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

Practice covers the holes

Posted June 30th, 2010 by Jimrobinson

Dear Kevin, 

I agree that the "real test is to take a break from all those practices and see what happens."  and I find your comment "It is usually not so good." interesting. I can only suggest that you experiment a lot more without any practice at all to really understand yourself, what's there when you strip away all those supports. I think this  is often where the real work of understanding ourselves begins.

Best of luck

Jim

 

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

being practical

Posted June 30th, 2010 by Kerry Dugan

So, what is practice?

Yesterday Michael Murphy, ITP co-founder, spoke about the invectives which propelled his being/doing at successive early periods of his unfolding (from compliance with cross-generational expectations of family, to assimilating the social mores of an ashram, to a deconstructive free-wheeling exploration…). Each point defined his practice, such as it was, and was… 

Today I hear Susanne Cook-Greuter express concern over a deepening trend of relying on "received knowledge", not fully digested, not exactly inhabited, a kind of "self-induction".

Michael began to discuss the practice of a vow, of a commitment, saying (something to the effect of) …when a commitment is aligned intimately with the core depths of the person, the vow… is a real vow, not merely an inflection of extra-personal structure or a reflection of a social or cultural pattern (such as the invectives that can compel behaviors, or a body of received knowledge parroted before it's digested and made our own).

And then there's George Leonard's  "Practice makes perfect. Be careful what you practice".

At some point, in demythologizing Practice, it helped me to boil commitment down to simply doing. No reference to future, no compliance with supposed externals, no should in between me and… what I'm doing. ILP, scalable, modular, fits that view, this point in my life, my practice. But how do I know whether I'm grounded in appropriate practice, appropriate doing, or ungrounded, in narcissistic discretion?

Even hermits and solitary yogis, with all their availability to practice, with all their immersion in inhabiting, with their professional opportunity to go deeper than received knowledges and extra-personal structures, do so in lineages, in sanghas, charisms, and orders… in community. Even a practice of 'no practice' happens in community.

We all do something all the time. Engaging ILP is incorporating some of the most communally valuable known doing into the stream of our personal doing… which we fill, anyway, with activity whether we practice or not.

edit: Michael probably said "injectives", not "invectives", but I'll leave my mistake as is. "Invectives" I was associating with an imposed trajectory, not it's usual meaning, "harsh denouncing language...

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

automaticity

Posted July 2nd, 2010 by stefano

 "I know I have the option of going into habit and default mode and engaging the American practice of TV, internet surfing, gaming, alcohol, fast food, sugar, and no exercise."

 

That one statement doesn't make a lot of sense in a wider context of ordinary people living their lives. It isn't even an American thing. All those activities have value in context. If we can't tell the truth about why we value those activities, how can we tell the truth about valuing spiritual freedom? Or anything else?